operation “get rid of half of our belongings” underway

For the last couple months, I’ve been in a bit of a funk about our house. It seems like my level of contentment about our house ebbs and flows, and every so often I find myself feeling very claustrophobic and ready to move to a prairie in Idaho or something. As the kids are getting bigger, the house is feeling smaller . . . and it wasn’t exactly big to begin with. Our mid-century house is just over 1300 square feet, and I apologize in advance if that seems huge to anyone else, but for me, it feels a little cramped for six people. The living area is actually decent, but the bedrooms are tiny and crowded, and the closets are the same size as the cabinet that houses our water-heater. The kids share bedrooms and we are in a constant state of overflowing closets and drawers. Karis’s habit of upending drawers doesn’t help, but it had gotten to the point where even I was struggling to get everything picked up on a regular basis. I was starting to dread doing laundry just because I knew that it would end with me searching for space to put things, and shoving things into drawers that were already barely closing. This Saturday, I decided I had just about had enough, and needed to rid ourselves of half our junk. Immediately.

I would love to say this shot represents the chaos of the project, but that’s pretty much what the girl’s room usually looked like. This is how it looked after removing about six trash bags of toys and clothing, now on their way to Goodwill.

Do you ever get that bug where you just have to complete a task RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE? That was me this weekend. We were coming off of two weeks of illness . . . a week of me having a sinus infection (again) followed by a week of Karis staying home with a miserable viral fever. Saturday was the first day where I wasn’t sick, or holding someone who was sick, and I was motivated to complete something. After going through both rooms and making some serious edits in our belongings, I got even more ambitious. I decided to swap the kids’ rooms. The boys’ room had way more closet space, but the girls have way more clothes. (Typical). It made much more sense to move the girls into the bigger room . . . especially now that Karis is old enough to share the bunk bed with India. So, Kembe moved into Karis’s room, Karis moved into the bunk bed in the former boys’ room where India has been sleeping all along, and Jafta took possession of the loft (which is really a glorified bunk bed in the crawl space above our closet). It’s musical beds at our house.

Don’t let the fish eye lens deceive you – this room is sooo tiny. A single bed and a dresser is all this room can hold. As it stands, the drawers bang into the keyboard when you open them.

The swap was good timing, because the new tenant in our backhouse didn’t want to use an old credenza we had stored back there. We decided to move it into the (new) boy’s room and it gave them a lot more drawer space.

I think the credenza needs a little paint love. I’ve seen some really nice refurbished furniture at Design Sponge where people have used contrasting colors. Paint recommendations for me?

If it’s a little quiet on the blog, you know where I’ll be. Next purge stop: my desk.